racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

Inq7.net picks up Migs’ story on the 3G battle between two of the Philippines’ major mobile providers, Globe and Smart.

I’m not really as excited about 3G as others are. 3G was the buzzword in the European and developed Asian markets two to three years ago, and what happened? It flopped, except in Korea and Japan, which went straight to 3G types of networks anyway, as opposed to the wide adoption of GSM elsewhere. Or at least it didn’t grow to be as economically viable as expected–perhaps the time was not ripe for such a technology.

I don’t know how successful Philippine telcos will be in their marketing of 3G in the country. Do they expect video telephony to be 3G’s killer app? That’s so 2003!

I don’t think we can expect a critical mass of Filipino mobile users who can afford high data rates, much lesss 3G-enabled handsets. Perhaps the higher-end consumers can afford the services and hardware, but will the prospective revenue stream from the high-end market be enough to cover for the high costs of investing in a 3G infrastructure?

And with all the marketing hoopla, are the networks even considering what exact 3G standard to implement? There are at least four of them, most, I think, already existent in some iteration since the turn of the century, but we haven’t seen a unification of standards. This could be 3G’s bane. The reason GSM has been successful and widely-implemented (even if it is technologically inferior to CDMA-type standards) is because the standard used is the same everywhere.




I wouldn’t want to waste my money buying a 3G handset that will only work with certain countries or networks. I want something that will work everywhere!

(more 3G news and insights at Pinoy.tech.blog)

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